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Paper short abstract:

The demarcation of colonial borders was often influenced by dynamics of inter-African relations that went back in time. The Anglo-French border between Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire was the result of a long history of competition between African polities for territorial control over a Borderland

Paper long abstract:

The frontier between Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire was created through the demarcation of a colonial boundary between Britain and France in late Nineteenth century. However the history of this frontier is much more complex than the pure result of European colonial enterprise.

When considered from a local - or micro-regional - perspective, the process which led to the 1889 Agreement demarcating the Anglo-French boundary was merely the final act in a long history that had begun at least 160 years before: more precisely around 1724-25, when the Anyi kingdom of Sanwi swept a number of communities and micro-polities in the valleys of Tano and Bia rivers, establishing its hold over the access to the Atlantic coast. In this process, Sanwi entered into fierce competition with the Nzema kingdom to the east.

After the collapse of Asante direct rule over the region in the 1820s, the Nzema kings attempted to expand territorial control over the Borderland by establishing military strongholds and supporting groups of settlers. In 1848 the British mediated a peace-agreement between Nzema and Sanwi, and a French-Dutch Border Convention in 1868 accepted the conventional boundary between the two polities.

These were the fundamental historical and legal precedents in the negotiations that set off in 1880 in order to demarcate a stable Anglo-French boundary. African agency actively interacted with vested European interests and strategies, contributing greatly to the consolidation of a new status quo. This made the border well recognizable by the people it was meant to separate